This essay aims to present the liminality of the 1920’s “East poems” in W.
B. Yeats. During this period, he published four “East poems,” “The Gift of Harun
Al-Rashid,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Mohini Chatterjee,” and “Byzantium.” While
illustrating Yeats’s fantasy of the Oriental, they also represent both his Anglo-Irish
liminality and his recurring attempts to resolve his own split identity. His imagined
East in this period is still a place of escape, which is an imagined and revitalizing
Orientalist world. The liminal status of these settings enables him to express his
meditation on Anglo-Irish undecidability. What is liminal in these poems, however,
buttresses his playfulness with loose structures and boundaries.